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Posted by Phil M on 02/08/07 15:49
Recording MiniDV in LP is like playing Russian Roulette. Period.
As a Television Producer for small low budget ethnic shows, I used to
record in LP with my then Canon GL-1. Playback was fine, everything
was fine. So to save a bit of cash (7 years ago miniDV tapes were
expensive) I started archiving the shows on miniDV. Again, everything
was fine. LP Playback was as good as an SP miniDV, and definitely
better than BetaSP. ...until the day that the GL1 developed a problem
beyond repair. Purchased a GL-2. The LP tapes were not playable any
more. I tried a variety of decks, DSR-11, DSR-25, Panasonics pro:
NOTHING. I was experiencing Severe audio and video dropout outs. I
just realized that 40% my archives (the ones in LP) were lost. As a
last resort, I leased (for a hefty price) a Sony DSR-2000A and
recovered my LP footage....
Again, LP may be playable today, but no guarantees for tomorrow. LP
(when it works) offers the SAME quality as SP. Both LP and SP are 25
Megabits per second. The difference in LP is that the same 25
megabits have to be "squeezed" in less tape area than SP. (10 microns
vs 6.7 microns for techies). The tolerances of miniDV LP are pushed
right to the edge. A negligible misalignment in the transport
mechanism or heads of the recoding device would result your footage be
only compatible with the original recoding device and not playable
anywhere else. A negligible misalignment of the playback device would
result in an unreliable playback.
I was a happy LP miniDV user, until the day it decided not to work and
that I had to shell big dollars to recover it. The time, effort,
energy and money spend, wasn't worth the money I thought I saved in
using LP.
Some may also argue that mixing tape manufacturers due to the
different lubricants used may clog the heads and cause dropouts.
Apparently this has been fixed some 10 years ago. If you go the Hard
Disk route and archive to Blue Ray, you may wish to save your files in
native DV, instead of MPEG, in order to have a 1-to-1 clone of your
edited/original footage.
good luck.
it gets worse with the 80 minute tapes or at LP speed. We used to be
>able to go LP all day long with no problem, but now we have one camera in
>for repair to check tape path and the other two are starting to exhibit the
>same bad habits.
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